opodeldoc in which an iron nail had been left for a week.

So Henry was embraced, Rolf was hand-shaken, Quonab was nodded
at, Skookum was wisely let alone, and the trim canoe swung from
the dock. Amid hearty cheers, farewells, and "God speed ye's" it
breasted the flood for the North.

And on the dock, with kerchief to her eyes, stood the mother,
weeping to think that her boy was going far, far away from his
home and friends in dear, cultured, refined Albany, away, away,
to that remote and barbarous inaccessible region almost to the
shore land of Lake Champlain.



Chapter 58. Back to Indian Lake

Young Van Cortlandt, six feet two in his socks and thirty- four
inches around the chest, was, as Rolf long afterward said, "awful
good raw material, but awful raw." Two years out of college,
half of which had been spent at the law, had done little but
launch him as a physical weakling and a social star. But his
mental make-up was more than good; it was of large promise. He
lacked neither courage nor sense, and the course he now followed
was surely the best for man-making.

Rolf never realized how much a farmer-woodman-
canoeman-hunter-camper had to know, until now he met a man who
did not know anything, nor dreamed how many wrong ways there were
of doing a job, till he saw his new companion try it.